


juno's sad and i'm sad and everyone's sad except rita, who is awesome

by badskeletonpuns



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Alcohol, Angst, Brownies, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Nail Polish, juno's not in a good place, post Juno Steel and The Stolen City Pt 1, rita's here for all the hugs, self harm mention, somebody give this lady a hug, spoilers for Juno Steel and The Stolen City Pt 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-01
Updated: 2017-09-01
Packaged: 2018-12-22 16:21:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11971113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badskeletonpuns/pseuds/badskeletonpuns
Summary: This was supposed to be a temporary title, but then I got attached to it.Juno is broken up about the events of The Stolen City and shutting himself off from the world and being Unwise With His Mental Health, but Rita is here to talk him out of it like the truly amazing friend she is. Also she has brownies. Always a plus.





	juno's sad and i'm sad and everyone's sad except rita, who is awesome

Rain hisses against the cheap window panes, curls of steam rising from wherever it has the chance to soak for more than a few seconds.

Juno sits on the floor and chews on his knuckles till they bleed, mutes his comms and his eye and anything else that could possibly interrupt the worst damn pity party this side of Mars. He stinks like stale whiskey and sweat but standing up is a lot of effort and standing for the entirety of a shower? Forget about it.

Grit rubs against his eyelids every time he blinks, even the fake one. He needs to sleep.

Every time he closes his eyes he sees that damn badge.

Barton Pollock.

He’s been blackout drunk and puked his way back to sobriety and gotten halfway to passing out again before giving up and leaving the bottle sloshing on the floor, and he still can’t unsee that name.

Whatever. Juno doesn’t deserve the blissful forgetting part of this shitshow, because he made this bed with a blaster he stole from the only good cop in the whole city and now he’s got to lie in it.

Barton’s family has probably been notified that he hasn’t come home yet.

That he’s never coming home.

Juno tips his head back, the cheap wood peeling up from the floor and catching on his hair when he tries to move. So he stops trying to move, stops trying to do anything except lie there and just wallow in his own toxic self pity, staring at the stained ceiling of his apartment and wishing he deserved anything but this.

He closes his eyes, and just for a second imagines a world where he hadn’t left that hotel bed hours before dawn. A world where he’d watched N… Where he’d watched someone sleep and smiled when they murmured his name, laid back down beside them and let the sound of their heartbeat lull him back to sleep.

“I miss you,” he says aloud, testing the words.

They hurt. More than he’d thought they would.

It doesn’t matter, no one’s here to hear him say it.

Juno breathes in as deeply as he can bear. A lump in his throat stops the breath halfway, threatening to flood his eyes with tears if he tries to take in any more oxygen. He’s not gonna cry, everything here is his own damn fault and he’s just gotta buck up and keep going. Do better next time. Pay the piper a little sooner, stop letting those dues rack up. Stop letting innocent people take the fall.

Barton Pollock is dead. Shot in the head on a museum floor, and Juno didn’t pull the trigger for that particular shot but he might as well have.

He curls into himself here, hopes that maybe if he pulls his arms tight enough around himself they’ll stop feeling like his. They’ll feel like someone else is be here holding him, someone else who would pull him up to his feet and flirt with him until they got in the shower together and make him clean himself up before they got dirty.

Oh, would you look at that, Juno’s tearing up.

The tears burn down his cheek like the rain scorching the walls and windows, and sting wherever they hit a not-yet-scabbed over knuckle. He should be glad he’s not sitting on the couch right now. Bloodstains are hell to get out of upholstery.

Juno tells himself that’s the only reason he’s not on the couch.

It’s not like he doesn’t have the will in him to get up off his damn floor, it’s not like someone he loves dies or is taken away or will do anything to leave his presence whenever he tries to do anything good on this miserable planet.

How’d it go, “No good deed goes unpunished?” Some shit like that.

Someone knocks at his door. Dammit. After a couple seconds they knock again, a little louder.

He decides to leave them to it.

Someone unlocks his door, and Juno had replaced the flimsy padlocks that came with every apartment with something more secure years ago. So, that’s not great.

He resolves to leave them to it.

It’s not like he’s got anything of any value except his eye, and that won’t work if they rip it out of his head so there’s no reason they’d kill him.

“Mister Steel!” There’s a high-pitched voice from the other side of his door and Juno kind of wishes he hadn’t left them to it. “I’ll be here as long as it takes, Mister Steel, I barely got the key in the lock here, I’ve got a whole ton of stuff and this carpet looks really gross, no offense, so I don’t want to put any of this down on the floor but my arms are reaaaally starting to hurt so can you please let me in?”

“Go away, Rita!” he shouts.

Which was a mistake, because now she knew both that he was here and awake.

“Come on, I got your favorite! Those big old brownies with all the frosting and sprinkles fresh-made in that little bakery right by work. Don’t think I haven’t seen you looking at ‘em, boss, because I know you have! You’re a real great detective but kind of bad at pretending you don’t like good things. And you’ve been working so hard lately, I know you haven’t taken a break. Everybody needs breaks sometimes! I got romcoms and just coms and all the good old earth movies and some of the less good old earth movies because I know you like making fun of ‘em, and-”

“Jesus, Rita, if I let you in will you stop talking for two seconds?” And Juno’s on his feet, a little shakier than he should be but he’s standing for the first time in… All day.

“No,” she says promptly, but he’s standing now anyway and she did say she had brownies, so he might as well let her in.

True to her word, Rita’s arms are filled with bags from the bakery and the grocery store a couple blocks down and cases of old holodisks. “Okay, no judgement here,” Rita says with what appears to be sincerity in her ridiculously friendly face, “but you kind of smell like a liquor store. And maybe some of your other friends think that’s cool, but if you want any of these brownies I think you have to go take a shower. Or at least change. Is that the same shirt you were wearing when you left the office on Friday?”

Juno just shrugs. Rita starts setting stuff down on his counters, brushing them clean with one sleeve. “I’m gonna put some stuff away, I had a bunch of leftovers and they’re all just gonna be wasted on me, there’s no way I can finish this. You don’t mind taking them off my hands, right? You’d be doing me a real favor, boss.”

He’s not smiling yet, but the lump in his throat is receding just a little. “I mean, I guess if I’m doing you a favor.”

Rita beams at him. “Great! Now go shower! Oh, oh, and if you have any nail polish you should bring it out, I brought some but I didn’t have enough space for all the colors I wanted to bring.”

And, well. It’s not… It’s not the man he left behind, smirking at him and calling him darling and following him into the shower. It’s not exactly what Juno wanted, what he imagined when he let himself down time and time again and desperately needed to be someone else.

But if he’s honest with himself (and this is one of the few times he is): It’s exactly what Juno needed.

Juno smiles at Rita, just a little. “I got a bottle or two. Be right back.” And he leaves her to pull out paper plates he didn’t even know he had and start setting out snacks, and heads into his bathroom to take a quick shower. And if he takes a quick moment to read that note he’s had since the case with the mask that still sits in his bedside drawer after getting dressed but before heading back out to Rita, well…

He’ll probably tell Rita a little bit about it. And she’ll gasp and ask “What happened next?!” in all the right places, and won’t pretend he’s not crying but will probably tear up with him and compare the whole story to a stream that ends in happily ever after that she’ll then somehow convince him to watch all seven seasons of.

Juno’s kinda looking forward to it.

**Author's Note:**

> Appreciate your friends, y'all! I know all too well the desire to shut oneself off and not talk to anyone, and while sometimes that's nice for us introverts, having a good friend around who understands when we really do need social contact or cuddling and bad-movie-watching is super awesome. Anyway, yeah! Vent fic and Juno and Rita bonding, what more could I ask for? :D Nothing.


End file.
